I’ve decided to try something a little bit different. After working on the website for my good friends Matt & Melinda and trying to fix their install of Gallery 2, it became really clear to me that Gallery simply isn’t working anymore. I don’t like the way it works, I don’t like the way it’s harder than hell to integrate into something like WordPress and I just don’t like it’s design anymore. Flickr, don’t get me wrong, is a great web service, but it simply isn’t for me. There’s no incentive to use it. If I didn’t have my own website or my own hosting I’m sure I’d be completely happy with Flickr. But, having 99% unused space on my server, there’s little to no point in using Flickr for storage alone. Plus, I never got into it to begin with, so that may have something to do with it. Now, enter in NextGen Gallery, a completely self contained WordPress Plugin fully capable of organizing and displaying photos in albums and galleries. I like it. I like it a lot. It’s easy, fairly intuitive, and a breeze to work with. I think I’m going to end up ditching both Gallery and Flickr in favor of NextGen. I’m working on moving, copying and or transferring photos over to it as we speak. I can FTP whole folders, autoscan to add them to galleries, and be done with the whole thing in less time than it would take Gallery’s uploader to start. So, from now on, take a look at the “Photos” link above and in the page links. It’s there to stay and the other galleries/link will be deleted from the project page. Sorry this isn’t a more in depth, life affirming sort of post, but I just thought I’d share a nifty plugin. More life affirming later.
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Hmmm, I’ll have to give that a shot. I gave up trying to integrate G2 with WP, and just run it totally separate now. For what it’s worth though, you can do the folder upload and scan thing with Gallery, it’s been a standard thing since I started using Gallery way back when. I tried using the Gallery Remote uploader a couple of times, but SFTP is just easier.
Yeah, G2 integration was just too much of a pain, that’s why I gave up too. There was a G2->WP plugin a while back, but I don’t think it was updated for widgets and the new code. Oh well.
NextGen seemed like any of the other 4 zillion image plugins in WP until I gave it a try. It was really robust and had a ton of features. I stopped jacking with G2 on my friends site, installed NG and had all their photos back up in about an hour. Theirs is a pretty basic setup of it, but you can check it out as an example.
And I did try to do a folder scan with G2 on a few occasions but it always seemed to either take longer than individually uploading files or it would just hang all together. I don’t think InMotion (host) had everything set up properly with all those wacky plugins and image processors it needed. Oh well.
Don’t get me wrong, Gallery was nice when it worked, but from the “ease of use” standpoint, NextGen was just easier to work with for what my friends needed.